If Oberlin is an instituion where every move you make is not associated with a cost center, more power to you. I agree with what you’re saying…doing it better necessarily means being more cost-effective, especially in the long run. The more flexible your design, the more able it is to adapt to growth/change, the more collaboration, the more intellectual capital and increased pull with administrators, etc. But where I come from, collaboration and risk-taking, even on open-source, costs major money and/or requires bureaucracy, and I suspect that to be the case at most public institutions, who are for the most part struggling to accommodate Web 1.0 when we’re all salivating at what could be done in our centers with physical space that complements Web 2.0 and 3.0 technologies.

As much as I love me some technology, I’m similarly underwhelmed by the Surface. I think it’ll have some great applications in the business world, particularly in sectors that already make use of touchscreens (restaurants, bars, casinos – some of the Surface’s early adopters, in fact). But I’m reluctant to hop on the table-sized touchscreen bandwagon for the general public. The practical side of me thinks, “EW! Do you know how often we’d have to -clean- those things? And what happens if when someone spills their lunch on it?” The tech geek side of me glares at our Tablet PCs and wonders, “Will the Surface be able to accomplish everyday tasks without straining under its own weight?” The couch potato in me whines, “Give me something more comfortable to sit at, so I’m not craning my neck at an uncomfortable angle just to see what’s going on.” I am reserving final judgement, though, until I see where Microsoft goes with this. If they respond well to the needs of average consumers, instead of building for large businesses and expecting everyone else to follow along, the Surface could have some potential.

Barbara,

Agreed: it’s not the size of your lab, it’s how you use it. But while we shouldn’t necessarily expect snazzy new toys to break the cycle, I think Shiny and New often go a long way towards easing transitions and getting people to think outside of their bubbles (boxes / bunkers / whatever) which is, I agree, what ultimately needs to happen. Technology can be a carrot on a stick … or a spoonful of sugar to help the medicine go down. That’s a dangerous path to start down, of course, and we have to be careful not to drift into using technology for its own sake. But a little fun never hurt anybody, did it?

Doug,

First, a caveat: I’m not a center Director, have only a couple of years of experience under my belt, and am lucky enough to work in a center that was thoughtfully and carefully designed, and that has as a result adapted well to changes in technology and in education. However (or maybe as a result?), I don’t feel angst and wish for more money when I look at our center. I wish for more cooperation, for more risk-taking from a technological point of view, and for -less- money spent. Specifically, I wish for a open-source lab that runs proprietary software only when no viable open-source alternative is available. I’d say more about this but it has the potential to be a rant … a separate-blog-entry-sized rant … and I’ll publish it as such in the next day or so.

Seriously, if money weren’t an issue, would your centers not look and feel radically different than they do now? Or am I being overly assumptive in thinking that all center directors, when left to gaze at their centers versus their Ideal, experience angst?

But like you said Barbara, mindsets must change before the money will flow…

It is really funny to me how we can as teachers encourage collaboration in the classroom but as professionals we seem to have a hard time building it into our centers. Is it because we really don’t control our centers, whereas we think we control our classrooms? or, the corrolary is that we are afraid to “let go” in our centers the way we can do in our classrooms?

It’s not the technologies that are gonna do this for us, it’s the mindset of the people who use the technologies and/or the people who control the centers where we do our work.

In anticipation of of my IALLT schtick I found a great quote from Henry Jenkins about how parents have more info available to them about the need to limit media for their children, but relatively little info on how they can help their kids build a meaningful relationships with the media…

THAT’S the work we should be doing, for our centers and our users, imho.

More coffee…

I hadn’t yet seen MS Surface, but LM3Labs and some SF-based company that I can’t recall now have had some really cool transparent interface designs on YouTube for some time now. In a decade or so, when it becomes affordable enough to con deans and department heads into pilot projects, I think this kind of technology will blow the hinges off of the walls of Barbara’s cubicles, but I think that before that happens, we will already have done much to turn our centers into collaborative social spaces that will prepare faculty and students to accommodate these types of technologies. Maybe then we quit calling the language lab a “lab”……

I am sorry it has taken me so long to post a comment. Life’s a little crazy for the next 10 days or so

You have touched upon something that I think bears repeating over and over: it’s not the the number of machines…it is the space and what we invite and encourage people to do in that space that is the most crucial. Part of the reason, I think, social software has not taken off (as much as it could) in Higher Ed is that we are still thinking in cubicles… we keep our learning experiences in separate, discrete, little cubicles. We also keep our teaching in those same little boxes. As Ewan McIntosh once said (and I am paraphrasing…I apologize Ewan) “classroom teaching is one of the few professions where you can close the door and do what you want.”

I, unlike you, do not think it is going to be snazy coffee table interfaces that is going to break this cycle, it is people like us showing how learning can be accomplished by letting go, by getting rid of the cubicles, and by collaborating.

It’s a huge psychological/ pedagogical/ almost spiritual shift that needs to happen… and (I agree..) it is more than how many stations are in your lab.